Prepping for Icecrown Citadel

I recently re-evaluated my character choices in light of the 3.3 patch (probable release date of 12/08/2009, or next week), and just wanted to go over the changes I made.

Gear
No changes - I already use 4t9 and with the 2t8 nerf I see no reason to change.  I did modify my gems slightly, going back to Potent over Reckless for good yellow sockets.  I lost 120 crit rating when I picked up a second Reign of the Unliving, and with ICC as the primary focus I don't see a need to value haste over crit any longer.

Spec
After some deliberation I decided to go into Icecrown with my Anub spec.

This took some thought.  I originally planned to go with something almost identical to the above, but without Typhoon and picking up the last point in Imp IS - that's a pretty optimized single-target build, but also with strong AOE.  However, reading strategies it looks like a lot of guilds find unglyphed Typhoon to be useful on Saurfang - there are adds that can't be tanked and need to be CCed, and Typhoon is a good choice because of the knockback + daze.

You could also easily do a build with 3/3 Imp IS and 1/2 Gale Winds, but it appears that at least two of the first four fights will have a non-trivial AOE component (Gunship/Saurfang), so I opted to go 2/2 GW.  One point in Imp IS is a relatively trivial single-target loss, while one point in Gale Winds is a very significant AOE loss.

Glyphs
So Starfall and Reign of the Unliving walk into a bar.
RotU: "I'm a trinket that procs from critical strikes, but only every two seconds.
Starfall: "What a coincidence - I can crit on a one-second period which exactly matches up with you.  Maybe we can work something out?"

Silliness aside, the Starfall Glyph (30 second cooldown reduction, NOT the focus glyph) and the Insect Swarm Glyph have always been relatively close in value.  My feeling is that with the neat little synergy between Reign and Starfall will make the glyph a bit more valuable, especially since I now use two of them.

If however you don't have Reign there are a few other reasons I changed to Starfall:

1. Each one of the first four fights - and many of the later ones - have adds.  Glyphing Starfall vs IS is a close call in a single-target situation, but as raids get complicated single-target situations tend to go away.  Expect a ton of adds in ICC, which will increase the dps benefit of Starfall.
2. Glyphed IS is important to keep up - you don't want 100% uptime but you should work it into practically every part of your rotation.  Unglyphed IS is much less critical - you pretty much want it up during Solar Eclipse... and that's it.  This frees up Insect Swarm as an, "oh, I have to move" spell - moving from fire?  Hit IS. Icecrown will most likely have a lot of movement, so having IS available more often will help mitigate some of that otherwise lost dps time.
   
3. 3% miss - I don't want to get into an avoidance vs EH argument, but suffice to say that 3% miss - while not being critical or even particularly important - is still, well, 3% flat avoidance.  Your tanks can't depend on it but it might prevent a death.

Keep in mind that if you Glyph Starfall you need to keep fairly close track of it and make sure you use it as often as possible - and as fight mechanics dictate.  I use Power Auras for this (and for Treants) to let me keep track of them easily and see when they'll be available, but other addons work as well.

Obviously any of the above might change in the future, but my goal is just to go into normal modes with something solid for all of the fights - for hard modes I anticipate optimizing on a per-fight basis, of course.

Power Auras And Innervate

About one month ago I read this post on the WoW druid forums.  Since then it's become especially useful on fights like Anub, where mana-management is extremely critical to performance.

Power Auras is an extremely flexible addon available from Curse.  It allows you to create a visual "aura" on your screen based on almost anything: buffs, debuffs, buffs/debuffs on your target, mana/health percentages, abilities off cooldown, abilities ON cooldown, and more.  What's interesting about that WoW forum post is it utilizes multiple auras that reference eachother, which creates a neat "AND" logic.  The first aura tells you when Innervate is off cooldown.  The second aura activates whenever your mana drops below 65% (I find this to be the bext amount where I can hit Innervate and not waste anything gained).

By linking these two together you get an indicator of when Innervate is available and when your mana is low enough to justify hitting it.

First you create the Innervate aura:

• To access Power Auras type /powa.  Then hit "New" to create a new aura.  After selecting it, hit "Edit" to start.
• Set the Activation By to "Action Usable".  This tells Power Auras to display the aura when the named ability is available for use.
• In the bar under Action Usable, type in Innervate.  Make sure this is exact, although you can tell it to ignore capitalization by checking "Ignore Uppercase" below.
• Only if in combat - this is optional.  Checking this will make the aura only activate if you are in combat, which will prevent you from seeing it every time you change specs or otherwise drop in mana.  I don't use it because it rarely matters for something like this.
• Set up the display - you will want to set up the aura to display in whatever manner you want.  I make the innervate aura nearly invisible by making it small and low opacity, because I let the mana aura dominate.  The post where I got this idea said you could turn one of the auras off (so the display wouldn't matter) but I had issues with getting it to work when I did this, so I leave both of them active.
  

Second, create the mana aura:

• Activation By should be "Mana".
• The bar below this will turn into a slide.  Set it to whatever percentage of your mana is around 10,000 down - I usually use 65%.  This ensures that after you hit Innervate you won't waste any mana from other gains, while still letting you use it early.
• Set up the display.  This is the aura that I want to be visible, so I make it go bang - it's in the middle of my screen, it's pretty large, and it's blue (because my brain associates that with mana/innervate).  I use a middle opacity so it doesn't totally interfere with my vision, but it still shows up immediately.

Finally, you need to create the linkage.  Type in /powa and hover over each of the auras you just created.  If this is your first time with Power Auras then those numbers should be 1 for Innervate, and 2 for the Mana.  Personally, the numbers are 3 and 4 for me.  Whatever they are, write them down or remember them.

Now go to your Innervate aura and hit Edit.  Down under where you typed "Innervate", and to the right of the "Exact Name" checkbox, there should be a second little box.  In this enter the number for the Mana aura.  Your final Innervate aura should look something like this:

Do the reverse in your Mana aura - in the same little box, enter the number for your Innervate aura.  So if Innervate is 1 and Mana is 2, then you put "2" in the Innervate box, and "1" in the Mana box.  This tells them to reference each other and only activate if the other one is also true.  Your final Mana aura should look something like this:

The end result of these two auras is that they will only show up when you are both below 65% mana, and have Innervate off of cooldown.  My display shows up like so:

One more thing I do that's related this is create another aura that displays prominently when I'm below 10% mana.  This is the range where I can't afford to Hurricane, so it's significant - it lets me know when I really, really need to Innervate, or when I should consider hitting GotW.  You can simply copy your Mana aura and remove the reference to your Innervate aura (or leave it in, if you feel like), and then change the display to make it show up better - I changed the color to bright green and put it at 100% opacity.  The end result is something like this:

                                                   

I find that this combination really helps me with mana management and lets me utilize Innervate as much as possible.  And while on most fights this isn't key, it's especially useful on stuff like Anub'arak where AOE - and therefore mana management -  is critical to both the fight and maximizing your dps.

WiseEclipse

I am just going to talk about this briefly.  WiseEclipse is an addon that allows the last Starfire in your Lunar Eclipse to proc Solar Eclipse.  It does this by canceling your Lunar Eclipse buff right after the last Starfire (based on cast time).

Using this addon almost feels like hacking - it's not, but it's so good that it seems that way.  This greatly improves your dps by increasing Eclipse uptime, I highly recommend it.

The best download I've found is here:
http://elitistjerks.com/f73/t71997-moonkin_ttt_article_pre_publish_draft/
Search for WiseEclipse.  If you don't want to use an addon, there's also a macro you can use for the same effect.  You will need something to open a .rar file if you don't have it, I use WinRar.

I found this because of Hamlet on TMR in this post - I don't know if he wrote the addon (it's unclear) but he deserves credit for the EJ post and the macro.